Big Changes in the Cloud Data Migration Market: Attunity and Alooma Get Acquired

Mid-February (Feb. 17 – 23) was a hot week for data and cloud migration companies with two big acquisitions.

Google announced on Tuesday, Feb. 19 the acquisition of Alooma to assist with cloud data migration issues. This acquisition aligns well with the 2018 acquisition of Velostrata to support cloud workload migration. This acquisition reflects Google’s continued interest in the Israeli cloud tech ecosystem to acquire technology solutions. It also shows that Google is pushing for enterprise cloud data and workloads and will be better positioned to migrate storage and compute from other clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. As Google Cloud Platform continues to grow, this allows Google to be better positioned to

• become a primary enterprise solution for more enterprises as Google is better positioned to acquire structured data en masse from public and private competitors
• be a credible backup or business continuity solution for enterprises that may want a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solution
• be a competitive provider to help enterprises with cost reduction either through being a foil in contract negotiations or to simply optimize cost in areas where Google resources and services end up being either more cost-effective or easier to manage than similar services from other cloud vendors

This acquisition will allow enterprises looking at cloud as a primary or significant compute and storage tool to consider Google Cloud Platform to replace, replicate, and/or backup existing cloud environments and provides a step forward for Google Cloud Platform to continue growing in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market that Amalgam Insights estimates is currently growing at over 50% year-over-year driven by AWS growing 45%, Microsoft growing 76%, Google Cloud Platform’s assumed growth of 30-40%, and Alibaba Cloud growth of 84% based on the last quarter, the last of which shows Alibaba’s potential to leapfrog Google Cloud Platform in the next even as it has not significantly expanded past the Chinese market.

And there’s more!

On Thursday, February 21, Qlik announced its intention to acquire Attunity for $560 million. Attunity is based in the Boston area and has been a market leader in change data capture and data duplication with a considerable enterprise and cloud provider customer list. The scale of Attunity’s data transfer needs has made Attunity a proven solution for managing, transfer, backup, and recovery of data for on-prem, private cloud, and public cloud.

When I first covering Attunity in 2012, the stock was trading at around $5 per share after having survived both the dot-com and 2008 recessions. At the time, the company was repositioning itself as a cloud enabler and I had the opportunity to speak at their 2013 Analyst Day. At that time, I told the investing crowd that Attunity was aligned to a massive cloud opportunity because of its unique role in data replication and in supporting Cloud-based Big Data.

In 2018, Attunity’s stock finally reaped the benefits of this approach as the stock tripled based on rapidly growing customer counts and revenue driven by the need to manage data across multi-region cloud environments, multiple cloud vendors, and hybrid cloud environments. In light of this rapid growth, it is no surprise that Attunity was a strong acquisition target in early 2019’s cash-rich, data-rich, and cloud-dependent world. Looking at Attunity’s income statements, it is easy to see why Qlik made this acquisition from a pure financial perspective as Attunity has crossed the line into profitability and developed a scalable and projectable business that now needs additional sales and marketing resources to fully execute.

Amalgam Insights believes that Attunity provides Qlik with a strong data partner to go with last year’s acquisition of Podium Data (also a Boston-area startup) as a data catalog. With this acquisition, Qlik continues to build itself out as a broad enterprise data solution post-Thoma Bravo acquisition.

With this acquisition, Qlik users are in a comfortable position of being provided with a next-generation data ecosystem to support their move to the cloud and to support a broad range of data sources, formats, and use cases. Qlik is taking a step forward to support mature enterprise needs at a time when a number of its Business Intelligence competitors are focusing on incremental changes in usability, data preparation, or performance.

Amalgam Insights sees the acquisition of Attunity as a competitive advantage for Qlik in net-new deals and believes that this acquisition provides companies considering investments in cloud data or broad cloud migrations to immediately add Qlik to the list of vendors that need to be added to the enterprise toolkit to fully manage these projects.

The big picture for enterprises is that cloud data migration is a core capability to support BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery), hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. Google Cloud Platform is now more enterprise-ready and competitive with its larger competitors, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, at a time when Thomas Kurian is taking the reins. Qlik is establishing itself as a powerful Big Data and Cloud Data vendor at a time when Big Data continues to triple year after year. The enterprise data world is changing quickly and both Google and Qlik made moves to respond to burgeoning market demand.